Meditation has revealed to me how deluded my mind is, and happily, how sane. It's also shown how I can grow the sanity and set aside the craziness, little by little.
Meditation is a kind of mental mirror. It requires a little personal courage, because like looking in a real mirror, we don't always like what we see. As we sit quietly with ourselves, we see with greater clarity our mental patterns, helpful and unhelpful. We witness the patterns of distracted attention, and over-thinking. We get to observe the mind's habit of traveling into the future and past, such that we lose touch with what's real- the present moment. And as we attempt to not follow our thoughts, and stay present, we find it's pretty difficult, often impossible, and experience frustration, self-criticism, and discouragement.
At this point, many people unfortunately conclude, 'I can't meditate.'
If you think you're incapable of meditation, hold on. It's easy to conclude that if one is viewing it through a success-failure lens. But that's too simple.
The 'success' and benefit from seeing the mind's rampant distractibility is like finding the hole in your roof where the water is leaking in. If you don't see the hole, you can't address it. If you don't observe and contemplate the distracted patterns, you may never progress beyond being the victim of them, and the mind will be yanking you around for the foreseeable future. The exciting promise of meditation is that it can help us unhook from that leash, and grow the ability to steer and use the mind to our benefit.
If you're finding meditation seems to be nothing more than rubbing your face in your mental chaos, be careful about what conclusions you draw from that. Again, having the courage to open the basement door and see the piles of dirty laundry is the beginning of getting one's house in order. The heaps of junk in the mind can be daunting, but the part of you that can look at it without turning away is the part meditation will strengthen. Look at the mess, don't turn away, and appreciate the part of you that's able to look- that's mindfulness.
In effect, the early efforts to meditate are primarily a fact-finding mission to inventory the mind's problematic habits.
Then a surprising, paradoxical element enters the picture. As we practice sitting and observing the distracted and unhelpful mental activity, we are beginning to meditate. This is pretty subtle, but it's exciting. You're beginning your hack. Rather than entirely ridding ourselves of distraction and unhelpful thoughts, we learn to step back and observe them. This is the quiet breakthrough in which we access an under-appreciated capacity of the mind- the observer, or witness. It's this part of the mind that we use to relate differently to our fears, doubts, self-criticism and worries. We begin to be able to observe our thoughts, moods, cravings and emotions as they come and go, and we stand slightly apart, knowing they don't entirely control us. They're not 'who we are', but rather internal events we experience.
This is the life-changing shift meditation has brought so many people. Meditators still get anxious, jealous, sad and lonely. They still experience worrying, judgmental thoughts. But they're no longer so afflicted by them. They learn to relate to these moods and thoughts, rather than from them. Meditation shows us how to reduce the amount of time we spend struggling with what we feel, or being afraid of it. We spend less time ruminating unhelpfully, as we learn to note the ruminating thoughts, and find our way back to 'reality', the moment we're actually in.
This is a slow, incremental change, a set of new habits which free us little by little to enjoy the moments we were previously missing, or judging. Life is still painful at times, but we don't add as much mental suffering to the pain. The empowering part is that we learn to do this for ourselves. We can increasingly use the mind, rather than it using us.
